The big day...

At 2.30 am on the morning of my due date, I woke, feeling what I knew wasn't a Braxton Hicks. It felt very different. At 4.30, they were every half hour, but not painful. At 6 am they were every 15 minutes. And carried on like that throughout the day. Noticeable but nothing worth more than a whince. At lunchtime, I panicked that I'd not got enough scratch mitts, I really was massively stressed about the minimal amount of scratch mitts we owned - despite a knowledge that they were unlikely to be useful as scans suggested I had a thumbsucker! But of course, nowhere had scratch mitts when I wanted them!! (i was sent a message later to tell me that someone had bought them and that I could relax - it helped!)

I spent the afternoon cleaning, polishing, ironing. Then at 9pm, the contractions were 9 minutes apart. I did the 'have a bath, take a paracetamol' thing. The hospital said that they thought it sounded as though I had a while yet so ring back in the morning. At 10.30 they were 6 minutes apart so her dad came home. By 11 they were 3 minutes apart and we were shortly in a taxi to the hospital, me kneeling in the footwell!

I was convinced  that this couldn't possibly be the real thing- plus I knew from all  the monitoring, how the numbers on the monitor changed when i was having contractions. And none of that happened... it turned out the cable wasn't attached, and not only were these very definitely real contractions, she was very nearly going to be here!!